Low Countries, 1300–1550(Chicago and London, 1998), 98–100; Henri Bresc, “Europe: Town
and Country,” in History of the Family, eds. André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Mar-
tine Segalen, and Françoise Zonabend (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 461–66. Bresc’s comparison of
Jewish and Christian societies is problematic because he compares Geniza society in Egypt and
medieval European cities.
- Grossman, Pious and Rebellious,63–87; idem, “Background to Family Ordinances—R.
Gershom Me’or haGolah,” in Jewish History. Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky, eds. Ada Rap-
paport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London, 1988), 3–23; Zeev Falk, Jewish Matrimonial
Law, 86–112. - Grossman discusses the importance of lineage at length in his Sages of Ashkenaz, 400–411,
but he only hints at family sizes, 8, n. 32. - Kenneth R. Stow, “The Jewish Family in the Rhineland in the High Middle Ages: Form
and Function.” American Historical Review92(1987): 1085–1090. - There is a need for further research concerning these networks. Irving A. Agus, Urban Civ-
ilization in Pre-Crusade Europe: A Study of Organized Town-Life in Northwestern Europe during
the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries based on the Responsa Literature(New York, 1965), 256–309;
idem, The Heroic Age of Franco-German Jewry(New York, 1969), 101–44 is one of the few schol-
ars to discuss these issues to date. - Grossman, Sages of Ashkenaz, 400–412.
- A comparison with the data Goitein collected about Jewish society in medieval Fustat re-
veals that although families often lived in shared courtyards, each conjugal unit was independent
financially: Goitein, A Mediterranean Society(Berkeley, 1978), 2:188; 3;130; 231; 291.
Notes to Chapter 1- A Mishnaic term for a miscarriage. For example: Niddah, 3:4.
2.For example, the summary of previous research in Cohen, “Be Fertile.” Cohen surveys the in-
tellectual history of the biblical commandment “Be fruitful and multiply,” but does not examine its
social contexts. For further discussion of Cohen’s book, see p. 25. - Ibid., and Ron Barkai, A History of Jewish Gynecological Texts in the Middle Ages(Leiden,
Boston, and Köln, 1998) have described at length the place of birth in intellectual traditions. Al-
though much has been written on the social aspects of birth in Christian society, nothing has been
written on these aspects in medieval Jewish society. - I am borrowing this formulation from Gail McMurray Gibson, “Scene and Obscene: See-
ing and Performing Late Medieval Childbirth,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
29(1999): 7–24, esp. 9–11. - Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male Like Nature Is to Culture?” in Making Gender(Prince-
ton, 1996), 21–42; Helen Callaway, “The Most Essentially Female Function of All: Giving Birth,”
in Defining Females. The Nature of Women in Society, ed. Shirley Ardener (Oxford and Provi-
dence, 1993), 146–67. - Shah·ar, The Fourth Estate, 98–106. Silvana Vecchio, “The Good Wife,” in A History of
Women in the West, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 2:106–
107; Berkvam, Enfance et maternité, 77. Although men also became fathers and were expected to
marry, they were primarily educated to study Torah and acquire a profession. We should note the
difference between being educated to be a wife and being educated to be a mother. The extent to
which the distinctions discerned by Vecchio apply to contemporaneous Jewish culture have only
recently been examined. See Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 216–29. - MS Oxford Bodl., Opp. 170, (1205), fol. 104 b–c. This manuscript contains a commentary
on piyutimmentioning many thirteenth-century scholars from northern France. - Ibid., fol. 105 c–d. For the piyut, see: Mah·zor le-Vamim nora’im, ed. Daniel Goldschmidt